About Kristin Zhivago

Kristin Zhivago began her career as the first woman to sell machine shop tools for a Pratt & Whitney distributor in 1969. She’s been on the bleeding edge of the hottest markets ever since.

Zhivago founded Zhivago Marketing Partners, Inc. in Silicon Valley in 1979. The company moved to a waterfront location in Rhode Island in 1996. Clients range from thriving young start-ups to those in the Fortune 500, including Dow Jones, IBM, and Johnson & Johnson.

Kristin is an expert on the customer's buying process. Over the years, she has devised, tested, and perfected a marketing and selling method that works in all industries, for all types of products. She helps her clients understand buyer needs, and then meet those needs with their products, people, and processes. She teaches company owners and managers how to answer all buyer questions in a way that will make it easy for the buyer to say "yes."

She has a working knowledge of marketing automation systems and products in the hardware, networking, security, instrumentation, electromechanical, microelectronic, and telecom industries; and all types of software, including programs used for website development and tracking, application development, computer-aided design, content management, manufacturing, business processes, point-of-sale, and more. She uses this knowledge to help recruit and screen appropriate staff for her clients, conduct customer interviews, and write copy that sells - no matter how technical the buyer is. Zhivago has written literally thousands of pages - online and off - of marketing and selling copy, and is often hired to create training guidelines and samples for marketers and salespeople.

Zhivago speaks and teaches frequently. She has spoken repeatedly for the American Electronics Association, the Business Marketing Association, and MarketingSherpa's BtoB Lead Generation Summit; she has also presented at the American Marketing Association, the Colorado Marcom Association, the IntelliQuest Brand Tech Forum, San Jose State University, the Software Entrepreneur’s Forum, The SoftLetter Software Marketing and e-Commerce summits, New Media Expo and The Best of eMarketing conference.

She has served as a judge for the SoftLetter Software Marketing Summit, the CreaTech Conference, the Tenagra Awards, the WebAwards, and the Bitpipe Whitepaper Awards.

Kristin is the editor of the Revenue Journal, a blog for company leaders. She published Marketing Technology, an ezine for marketers, from 1991 to 2004.

Her articles and monthly columns have appeared in numerous trade and business journals, including MarketingSherpa's newsletters, BtoB magazine, Sales Advertising Marketing magazine, Business 2.0, SoftwareCEO.com, BtoB, Adweek's Technology Marketing, and CMO magazine.

Kristin is the author of a business growth book, Rivers of Revenue.